Et tu, Jackie?

 I'm not sure what Mark Antony (2023) is trying to be.  Time travel comedy?  Gangster melodrama?  Incredibly loose Shakespeare adaptation?  Satirical commentary on all of the above?  Whatever it is, though, it commits to the bit.

 

In 1975, scientist Chiranjeevi (Selvaraghavan) has finally completed his grand invention, a telephone with the power to call the past.  he tests the phone by calling his past self, preventing an accident which cost his wife (Anitha Sampath) a leg and a teaching career.  After a bit of further experimenting, he figures out the rules; there are a lot of them, but the important ones are that the phone can only call a particular number once per day (as perceived by the receiver, not the caller), the phone can absolutely change the past, and only the caller will remember the original timeline.  he goes out to a nightclub to celebrate, and is shot during the assassination of powerful gangster Antony (Vishal.)  A dying Chiranjeevi tries to use the phone to save himself, fails, and dies with a quick speech about how no man can cheat fate, despite the fact that he has already cheated fate more than once.  

In 1995, Antony's old partner Jackie (S. J. Suryah) has taken over the business, and rules as the town's sole godfather.  Jackie is a benevolent crimelord, and is especially devoted to taking care of Antony's son Mark (also Vishal).  Mark is grateful, but he has absolutely no interest in a life of crime, because he blames his father for the murder of his mother Vedhavalli (Abhinaya).  Instead, he works as a mechanic and dreams of marrying the beautiful Ramya (Ritu Varma) and moving to a place where no one knows about his shameful family history.

Jackie's own son, Madhan (also S. J. Suryah) is very interested in a life of crime, and is planning to murder his father and take over the organization.  He's not very good at it, though,  and Jackie either doesn't notice or doesn't care, so everyone maintains a comfortable but dysfunctional equilibrium.

And then everything changes.  Ramya's mother discovers that Mark's father was the notorious Antony, so any hope of an engagement is shattered.  And then he discovers a phone locked in a suitcase stuffed in a car that used to belong to Ramya's deceased uncle Chiranjeevi.  He discovers a notebook giving instructions for how to use the phone, starts making calls, and things get weird.  

Mark wants to learn what his father was really like, so he uses the phone to prevent the death of  Antony's lawyer (Nizhalgal Ravi) and arranges a meeting in order to ask him.  He does, and discovers that his father was actually a loving husband and wonderful person, and all the drug peddling, gun running and prostitution was actually Jackie's doing, while Antony used his crime ring to protect the community.  Jackie pops up to confirm that yes, he's been the villain all along, and he's going to kill them both.  Mark manages to call his father, and history changes.

In the new timeline, Jackie is dead, Antony is gone, Mark is the crimelord and Madhan is the mechanic.  Nobody is happy.  This version of Ramya hates Mark, Mark doesn't have the skills to runa  criminal empire, and Madhan wants money, power, and revenge on Mark.  Mark tries to fix things using the phone, then Madhan steals it and calls his father, leading to a series of failed assassination attempts and a brief appearance by eighties sex symbol Silk Smitha (Vishnu Priya Gandhi).

That synopsis makes Mark Anthony sound almost mundane, just a South Indian gangster action comedy mixed with Back to the Future.  And it is, most of the time, but everything is stylized and tremendously stylized and really big.  The action scenes aren't quite Bahubali level, but they are impressively improbable, particularly the big set piece on a double decker bus.  And then 1995 Antony appears and takes everything up a level.

The plot, on the other hand, is pretty much nonsense, with time travel rules that make Back to the Future seem like hard science fiction.  And I'm still not sure if the movie is trying to be a loose adaptation of Julius Caesar, with Antony literally stabbed in the back by a circle of his closest friends and Mark trying to avenge him and right the ship of (criminal) state.